Fans of AncientAliens probably remember Nick Pope, the UFO enthusiast who used to run the British Ministry of Defence’s UFO reporting program. Pope has expanded beyond capitalizing on his government title to write fiction and now to work on video games. Beyond this, Pope is also proud of the fact that he will sell his opinion on UFOs to corporate sponsors for cash. He has opined about UFOs in order to generate buzz for 7-11’s “Check into Space” campaign, Doritos, Battle Los Angeles, Fringe, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, and an incredible list of other people who pay him to promote UFOs for cash.

Since he makes so much money off promoting UFOs as a legitimate subject and from conflating fact and fiction by providing “real life” stories to drum up interest in movies and TV shows, it is not without interest that we read his interview yesterday in Venture Beat’s “Games Beat” section. Pope was asked specifically whether fiction has an impact on whether people come to believe in alien visitations. Take a look at what Pope said in response:

Science fiction and the whole idea of aliens, in movies and computer games, is so embedded now in the public consciousness that it’s difficult to separate the fact and the fiction. Some people think that Hollywood movies and computer games are one of the ways in which governments slowly acclimatize people to this. There used to be this old theory that you couldn’t say this was real, because there would be panic in the streets. But what if you slipped it out generally, slowly, over the years, in all these movies, so that people were so used to the idea?

Now, shouldn’t Nick Pope actually know this one way of the other since he was allegedly privy to all this information in the past and is currently working with the Hollywood studios and game companies? And since he wants to place it in the hypothetical, it sounds very much like he’s purposely hedging to keep the gravy train a-rolling. More interesting to me is the way that both Pope and interviewer Sebastian Haley place alien contact in the context of moral questions, and tacitly conflate the West with the world, as though aliens wouldn’t affect non-Western peoples. Pope describes hoping that any visiting aliens are friendly lest they destroy us all.

GamesBeat: We can hope that it doesn’t come back on us, all the terrible things that we’ve done to other civilizations.Pope: Yes. It would be a kind of cosmic karma, I suppose, if it did. Our only hope would be that great staple of sci-fi, to use the aliens’ own technology against them.

I don’t think much commentary is necessary to understand the underlying material here. This isn’t about aliens very much at all; it’s about “us” as a people and as individuals symbolically negotiating power relationships and dynamics within and between societies.

Keep an eye on the skies for saucers during the Olympics Games,warns former MoD UFO expert : http://tinyurl.com/k7uwtrv

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Paul Cargile

7/19/2013 03:01:52 am

Why "panic in the streets"? Unless of course they were reduced to rubble and were on fire, but otherwise. . . . It's a weak assumption to hang a cover-up conspiracy on.

Why would they be interested in us at all. Perhaps the aliens would stop over in our solar system and top off the fuel tanks at Jupiter and be on their way, ignoring our calls in much the same we ignore wild life in our daily lives.

Use their weapons against them? The odds of an alien visitors or conquerers, or galactic construction teams being only a few hundred years more advanced than us is astronomically low. Millions of years is more likely. Given that, there is nothing we could possible do against them, no more than the ants can stop me from mowing over their hills.

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Ves

2/9/2016 07:31:06 pm

The aliens will always be more advanced than us theory really doesn't hold empirically. Logically we don't have any examples to make that guess since as we've seen with different cultures tech isn't linear China had guns hundreds of years before the rest of the world after all. So it's possible a species found some other means of traveling to space that seems impossible to us. For example maybe they found some form of tech that allows the creation of interstellar travel that doesn't rely on weapons development ours. For example the discovery of gunpowder led to people learning of its explosive effects and that led to propelling things by it's explosion. But what if an alien race never discovers such a thing and some other material on their planet that isn't so easily weaponized led to their voyages into space.

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